In 1993 Jolente De Keersmaeker and Damiaan De Schrijver, together with Julien Schoenaerts, created Gewoon Ingewikkeld, based on Einfach Kompliziert by Thomas Bernhard. It was inevitable that Bernhard would continue to be one of STAN’s fellow travellers. Now the theatre company presents three Bernhard adaptations as a trilogy: a true Bernhard marathon that is around six hours long.

History is written by winners. Including all the lies, chance encounters, and accidents de parcours. With this realization in mind, Jan Lauwers and Needcompany travel through time by way of the family trees of all the members. After an international tour – and being selected for the TheatreFestival 2016 – The blind poet is returning to the place where it premiered: the Kaaitheater.

Elfriede Jelinek wrote Die Schutzbefohlenen in 2013 as a reaction to the increasingly desperate refugee problem in Europe. Her text has proved to be more than prophetic: all the images that are now burnt into our memories she minutely calls to life years before the actual events. Guy Cassiers matches Jelinek’s torrent of words with images and with four dancers in a choreography by Maud Le Pladec.

Theatre director Thomas Bellinck thinks the time is ripe to scrutinize digital migration management. Can one simply outsource unease about social sorting? Discussions with border and data managers in the control rooms of Project Europe were the starting point of this documentary musical.

A philanthropist – one who still genuinely believes in progress – builds a ship. However much like a fable it may seem, Pieter De Buysser’s planetarium production was inspired by contemporary socio-political realities. Take a chance on this border exploration for nationalists, homeland research for cosmopolitans, and cosmology of a new worldview.

A masked soldier starts talking to the woman he is burying alive. This dialogue between victim and perpetrator gradually becomes absurd. The young Palestinian director Bashar Murkus confronts you both with a fictionalized reflection of the war in Syria and with a vision of the totalitarian violence that holds the Middle East in its grip.

In Cinema Dialogue, Monika Gintersdorfer and Knut Klaßen critically examine the United Nations’ ostensibly apolitical Millennium Development Goals. They juxtapose the universalism of the UN programme with the local reality of urban development in Kinshasa between 2000 and the present day.

Can light be a compositional building block? The Liquid Room Series radically questions the classical concert model. The audience is free to move around among the various stages set up in the dismantled hall of the Kaaitheater. Immerse yourself in a pure experience of sound and light!

A sudden and uannounced event can change the colour of whatever went before. unannounced – a performance for six dancers – plays with the way your focus shifts when a sudden apparition suddenly changes your perspective. The creators zoom in on the deep dark shades of the black box to look beyond the surface of the here and now. The anticipation of what is to come echoes the afterglow of the past.

When you read, you make choices. You translate what you read into the language of your life. A book like Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina could also be the collection of lives it has changed, for better or for worse. In this first play Tiago Rodrigues writes for tg STAN, he convincingly builds a bridge between the actors of the Portuguese Teatro Nacional and those of STAN.

How do we envision the art spaces of tomorrow? How can we reshape these meeting places and laboratories for coexistence? The artists of Damaged Goods set up camp in a former factory in Molenbeek – housing the Decoratelier of scenographer Jozef Wouters – to formulate some physical answers to these questions.

Trajal Harrell explores a moment in dance history when female artists presented performances on the boundary between entertainment, erotic dancing, and early experiments in modern dance. CAEN AMOUR is structured as a hoochie coochie show. With a seductive performance, scantily dressed ‘hoochies’ lure you around to the backstage area, to reveal the festivities on the ‘coochie’ side.

In this piece for three dancers, Ola Maciejewska draws her inspiration from Loïe Fuller, one of the pioneers of modern dance and performance art. She explores the relationship in the arts between human beings and physical matter by creating movement in large pieces of fabric. She plays with the confluence of bodies and objects and the battle that these wage.

With In Many Hands, McIntosh dives into a tactile and multi-sensory world. She invites you to test, touch, listen and smell. She turns her back on the stage and opts for a series of sensory ‘situations’ which give you free rein to experiment. Take your time to explore and follow your nose!

In this performance/cookery workshop, Feiko Beckers teaches you some cooking techniques using faulty instructions and impractical utensils. You can be sure that the result will be inedible, but in Feiko Beckers’ world, failure is always a joy!

DD Dorvillier presents a collection of danced fragments drawn from videos of her works while a youngster in the New York 90’s. The colourful exhibition Decor at Villa Empain forms a new backdrop. This way of looking back and into dance aims to be as subjective, aesthetic, and playful as possible.

Choreographers Felix Mathias Ott and Bahar Temiz are fascinated by a movement language that shifts between intimacy and sheer violence. How does a performance creates its own stage, its own beginning, its own onlookers on the verge between violence and tenderness

In their performances, author and artist Romy Rüegger and electronic music performer Deena Abdelwahed reflect on ways of personal entanglement with the world and its politics, including the interpretation of history as part of the present.

You and a partner sit side by side in the reading room of Muntpunt. Via headphones and a notebook, a voice gives whispered instructions that guide you through a pile of books. A unique narrative thus unfolds for each duo. It is an intense and intimate hour-long experience – situated among studying students and reading library-users – that brings out the strange magic at the heart of reading.

Ant Hampton decided to step outside the building and beyond the comfort zone of an autonomous art practice, opting instead for an aim of real consquence via a clear demand: break your bubble. This performance-as-assignment for two, gently reveals itself as an urgent and vibrant challenge to audience, artist and art-centre.

Maarten Vanden Eynde and Alioum Moussa are building a two-part mobile structure, of which one side is the other’s opposite. During Performatik17 they set up shop at Place de la Monnaie, where you are invited to visit them – in pairs – for a discussion about dependence and independence.

Maarten Seghers looks for a confrontation with the artists, musicians and dancers Fritz Welch, Simon Lenski, Nicolas Field and Mohamed Toukabri, for whom he wrote an invocatory song about the noisiness of comforting.

In her new solo – and anagram – oslo, Mette Edvardsen once again plays with language, time and space. She extends the concept of the solo into the entire theatre space, where thoughts, words, things and actions multiply.